IT-Conductor Latest Automation Features Q1-2024

Apr 18, 2024 | Femi Charles

IT-Conductor is excited to unveil its latest automation features for Q1-2024! Dive into this roundup of customer-centric tools designed to empower users with actionable insights, on-call scheduling, and real-time monitoring of critical SAP metrics. Plus, don't miss out on key events from the last quarter at the bottom of this page!

1. Incidents Search

IT-Conductor now provides an intelligent search function that enables customers to search for specific keywords and phrases from past incident tickets that are relevant or applicable to their current issue. The tool allows users to apply operators to refine search results. It is accessible from the support ticket page, with clear instructions to guide users through the search process.

By leveraging the accumulated knowledge base of past tickets, you can potentially resolve your issue without requiring assistance from IT-Conductor support.

Figure 1: IT-Conductor Incidents Search

2. HANA Records Lock Monitoring

IT-Conductor also now offers HANA lock age monitoring as part of its comprehensive monitoring of HANA systems. This feature allows you to track exclusive locks held for extended durations that exceed a defined threshold. Alerts are generated, and notifications are sent to subscribers when this condition is met. This feature provides an overview of the status of record locks.

Combined with existing blocked transaction monitoring, you'll gain insights into which records are currently locked and by which transactions. This feature helps identify potential bottlenecks and allows you to take corrective steps to optimize your database performance. Overall, these features enable you to maintain efficient lock management.

Figure 2: IT-Conductor HANA Lock Age Monitoring

Figure 3: Sample HANA Exclusive Lock Monitoring

3. Shift/On-call Scheduling

IT-Conductor now delivers integrated On-Call Scheduling. This feature helps rotate engineers through scheduled shifts who are part of an on-call rotation and are responsible for system maintenance and customer support.

IT-Conductor Shift/On-call scheduling features include:

Flexible shifts and rotations definitions:
- Multiple Shifts per organization
- Shifts support multiple Rotation schedules
- Custom on-call times for month and weekdays
Integrated with Time-off schedules:
- Time-off requests and other calendar events are considered when scheduling on-call shifts.
Fully integrated into IT-Conductor notification architecture:
- Use shifts transparently as notification targets in subscriptions, etc.
- Shifts can be used as recipients for reports and execution logs, whereby only the active person on-call would receive the notification.

Figure 4: IT-Conductor Shift Management

Shifts consider time zones and allow shift swaps to accommodate workers with impromptu emergencies or appointments.

On-Call Scheduling automatically assigns on-call duties to team members in a rotating fashion. This automated process reduces administrative burden and enables incident managers to allocate qualified resources to address customer issues promptly.

You can use your organization's calendar view to manage all scheduled events, including time off, scheduled maintenance activities, On-call assignments, etc. You also have the option to use your personal calendar to view your on-call assignments and other events. You can navigate the shift back and forth in time and access individual on-call assignments by clicking on the colored bars.

Figure 5: Organization Calendar View

Significance of On-Call Scheduling

IT organizations delivering critical, always-on infrastructure rely on groups of engineers in different time zones to serve as the first line of defense against outages and performance issues. These engineers typically follow a rotating schedule where each person serves as the primary contact during their business hours on specific days of the week. The size of the group and the IT environment determine the frequency of this rotation.

Implementing an on-call scheduling process is critical for ensuring round-the-clock customer support coverage and promptly attending to customer issues as they arise.

Benefits of On-Call Scheduling with IT-Conductor

Enhanced team transparency fosters greater accountability
Ease of setup and management
Better service health awareness and prompt resolution of incidents
Reliable 24/7/365 customer support
Efficient use of on-call staff's time
Simplified and automated shift process and administration
Improved mean time to resolve (MTTR) customer issues

These benefits collectively lead to reduced service disruptions, reduced revenue loss, decreased customer churn, and improved service reliability.

4. Veeam Backup Monitoring & Management

IT-Conductor now supports Veeam Backup and Replication, aligning with Veeam's reputation as a global leader in data protection and ransomware recovery. With this integration, IT-Conductor offers direct management of your Veeam Backup & Replication servers, enabling you to protect all critical business workloads. This feature comes with custom threshold definitions, alert generation, and notifications from IT-Conductor.

Figure 6: Veeam Backup and Replication Monitoring

The monitoring offering includes:

Tracking certificate expiration (Validity, Days to expiration)
Monitoring Backup Repos (status, space available)
Monitoring Backup/Job Sessions (Errors, Active count, duration). Clicking on the Job Details icon opens up an overview of the job, including related Backups, Repos, and Sessions.

On the automation front, IT-Conductor executes backups and recoveries efficiently. Using familiar scheduling options (e.g., scheduled, auto-recovery, manual), the backups can be executed, and the execution log can be delivered via email as customary in IT-Conductor.

Figure 7: Veeam Backup Job in IT-Conductor

Our solution offers protection against outages, ensures compliance with SLAs through a reliable backup & recovery framework, addresses backup inefficiencies and complex data management challenges, enhances disaster recovery capabilities, minimizes downtime, simplifies management tasks, and facilitates scalability.